On the Implementation of Producer Gases as Alternative Fuels in Steel Reheating Furnaces

During the past decades, combustion of producer gases from other facilities has been introduced as one of the promising techniques in steel furnaces. The impurities inside producer gases are responsible for a low quality steel production due to formation of the molten ash that forms sticky layers of solutions on steel surfaces. Therefore, a comprehensive investigation is needed before a full implementation of producer gases inside the industrial furnaces. In this paper, the effects of impurities inside the gasified biomass flue gases are thermodynamically investigated regarding temperature zones inside a reheating furnace. After that, the high temperature agent combustion (HiTAC) is investigated as a solution for a steel batch reheating furnace to reduce the side effects of using the producer gases. Finally, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is used as a numerical technique to compare four different producer gases in the studied furnace. The temperature distribution is validated with existing literature data. It shows a good agreement with a 5% error in the heating and a 10% error in the soaking zones of the reheating furnace. The comparison of simulation results assists in the understanding of the chemical and thermal behavior of different gases and provides useful data for the furnace fuel optimization.Copyright © 2015 by ASME